The Stories of Richard Bausch

by Richard Bausch

  “I’m up,” he told her.

  “Don’t just say ‘I’m up.’”

  “I am up,” Casey said, “I’ve been up since five forty-five.”

  “Well, good. Get up up.”

  He had to wake the boys and supervise their preparations for school, while Jean put her makeup on and got breakfast. Everybody had to be out the door by eight o’clock. Casey was still feeling the chill of what he had dreamed, and he put his hands up to his mouth and breathed the warmth. His stomach ached a little; he thought he might be coming down with the flu.

  “Guess what I just dreamed,” he said. “A truly awful thing. I mean a thing so scary—”

  “I don’t want to hear it, Casey.”

  “We were all in the old Maverick,” he said.

  “Please. I said no—now, I mean no, goddammit.”

  “Somebody was going to destroy us. Our family.”

  “I’m not listening, Casey.”

  “All right,” he said. Then he tried a smile. “How about a kiss?”

  She bent down and touched his forehead with her lips.

  “That’s a reception-line kiss,” he said. “That’s the kiss you save for when they’re about to close the coffin lid on me.”

  “God,” she said, “you are positively the most morbid human being in this world.”

  “I was just teasing,” he said.

  “What about your dream that somebody is destroying us all. Were you teasing about that too?” She was bringing what she would wear out of the closet. Each morning she would lay it all out on the bed before she put anything on, and then she would stand gazing at it for a moment, as if at a version of herself.

  “I wasn’t teasing about the dream,” he said, “I had it, all right.”

  “You’re still lying there,” she said. “I’ll get up.”

  “Do.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “Casey, do you have any idea how many times a day you ask that question? Get the boys up or I will not be all right.”

  He went into the boys’ room and nudged and tickled and kissed them awake. Their names were spelled out in wooden letters across the headboards of their beds, except that Rodney, the younger of the two, had some time ago pulled the R down from his headboard. Because of this, Casey and Michael called him Odney. “Wake up, Odney,” Casey murmured, kissing the boy’s ear. “Odney, Odney, Odney.” Rodney looked at him and then closed his eyes. So he stepped across the cluttered space between the two beds, to Michael, who also opened his eyes and closed them.

  “I saw you,” Casey said.

  “It’s a dream,” said Michael.

  Casey sat down on the edge of the bed and put his hand on the boy’s chest. “Another day. Another school day.”

  “I don’t want to,” Michael said. “Can’t we stay home today?”

  “Come on. Rise and shine.” Rodney pretended to snore. “Odney’s snoring,” Michael said.

  Casey looked over at Rodney, who at five years old still had the plump, rounded features of a baby; and for a small, blind moment he was on the verge of tears. “Time to get up,” he said, and his voice left him.

  “Let’s stop Odney’s snoring,” Michael said.

  Casey carried him over to Rodney’s bed, and they wrestled with Rodney, who tried to burrow under his blankets. “Odney,” Casey said, “where’s Odney. Where did he go?”

  Rodney called for his mother, laughing, and so his father let him squirm out of the bed and run, and pretended to chase him. Jean was in the kitchen, setting bowls out, and boxes of cereal. “Casey,” she said, “we don’t have time for this.” She sang it at him as she picked Rodney up and hugged him and carried him back into his room. “Now, get ready to go, Rodney, or Mommy won’t be your protector when Daddy and Michael want to tease you.”

  “Blackmail,” Casey said, delighted, following her into the kitchen. “Unadulterated blackmail.”

  “Casey, really,” she said.

  He put his arms around her. She stood quite still and let him kiss her on the side of the face. “I’ll get them going,” he said. “Okay?”

  “Yes,” she said, “okay.”

  He let go of her and she turned away, seemed already to have forgotten him. He had a sense of having badly misread her. “Jean?” he said. “Oh, Casey, will you please get busy.”

  He went in and got the boys going. He was a little short with them both. There was just enough irritation in his voice for them to notice and grow quiet. They got themselves dressed and he brushed Rodney’s hair, straightened his collar, while Michael made the beds. They all walked into the kitchen and sat at their places without speaking. Jean had poured cereal and milk, and made toast. She sat eating her cereal and reading the back of the cereal box.

  “All ready,” Casey said.

  She nodded at him. “I called Dana and told her I’d probably be late.”

  “You’re not going to be late.”

  “I don’t want to have to worry about it. They’re putting that tarry stuff down on the roads today, remember? I’m going to miss it. I’m going to go around the long way.”

  “Okay. But it’s not us making you late.”

  “I didn’t say it was, Casey.”

  “I don’t want toast,” Rodney said.

  “Eat your toast,” said Jean.

  “I don’t like it.”

  “Last week you loved toast.”

  “Nu-uh.”

  “Eat the toast, Rodney, or I’ll spank you.”

  Michael said, “Really, Mom. He doesn’t like toast.”

  “Eat the toast,” Casey said. “Both of you. And Michael, you mind your own business.”

  Then they were all quiet. Outside, an already gray sky seemed to grow darker. The light above the kitchen table looked meager; it might even have flickered, and for a bad minute Casey felt the nightmare along his spine, as if the whole morning were something presented to him in the helplessness of sleep.

  He used to think that one day he would look back on these years as the happiest time, frantic as things were: he and Jean would wonder how they’d got through it; Michael and Rodney, grown up, with children of their own, might listen to the stories and laugh. How each day of the week began with a kind of frantic rush to get everyone out the door on time. How even with two incomes there was never enough money. How time and the space in which to put things was so precious and how each weekend was like a sort of collapse, spent sleeping or watching too much television. And how, when there was a little time to relax, they felt in some ways just as frantic about that, since it would so soon be gone. Jean was working full time as a dental assistant, cleaning people’s teeth and telling them what they already knew, that failure to brush and floss meant gum disease; it amazed her that so many people seemed to think no real effort or care was needed. The whole world looked lazy, negligent, to her. And then she would come home to all the things she lacked energy for. Casey, who spent his day in the offices of the Point Royal Ballet company, worrying about grants, donations, ticket sales, and promotions, would do the cooking. It was what relaxed him. Even on those days when he had to work into the evening hours—nights when the company was performing or when there was a special promotion—he liked to cook something when he got home. When Michael was a baby, Jean would sometimes get a baby-sitter for him and take the train into town on the night of a performance. Casey would meet her at the station, which was only a block away from the Hall. They would have dinner together and then they would go to the ballet.

  Once, after a performance, as they were leaving the Hall, Jean turned to him and said “You know something? You know where we are? We’re where they all end up—you know, the lovers in the movies. When everything works out and they get together at the end—they’re headed to where we are now.”

  “The ballet?” he said.

  “No, no, no, no, no. Married. And having babies. That. Trying to keep everything together and make ends meet, and going to the ballet and having a baby-sitter. Ge
t it? This is where they all want to go in those movies.”

  He took in a deep breath of air. “We’re at happily ever after, is what you’re saying.”

  She laughed. “Casey, if only everyone was as happy as you are. I think I was complaining.”

  “We’re smack-dab in the middle of happily ever after,” Casey said, and she laughed again. They walked on, satisfied. There was snow in the street, and she put her arm in his, tucked her chin under her scarf.

  “Dear, good old Casey,” she said. “We don’t have to go to work in the morning, and we have a little baby at home, and we’re going to go there now and make love—what more could anyone ask for.”

  A moment later, Casey said, “Happy?”

  She stopped. “Don’t ask me that all the time. Can’t you tell if I’m happy or not?”

  “I like to hear you say you are,” said Casey, “that’s all.”

  “Well, I are. Now, walk.” She pulled him, laughing, along the slippery sidewalk.

  Sometimes, now that she’s gone, he thinks of that night, and wonders what could ever have been going on in her mind. He wonders how she remembers that night, if she thinks about it at all. It’s hard to believe the marriage is over, because nothing has been settled or established; something got under his wife’s skin, something changed for her, and she had to get off on her own to figure it all out.

  He had other dreams before she left, and their similarity to the first one seemed almost occult to him. In one, he and Jean and the boys were walking along a quiet, tree-shaded road; the shade grew darker, there was another intersection. Somehow they had entered a congested city street. Tenements marched up a hill to the same misty nimbus of light. Casey recognized it, and the shift took place; a disturbance, the sudden pathology of the city—gunshots, shouts. A shadow-figure arrived in a rusted-out truck and offered them a ride. The engine raced, and Casey tried to shield his family with his body. There was just the engine at his back, and then a voice whispered “Which of you wants it first?”

  “A horrible dream,” he said to Jean. “It keeps coming at me in different guises.”

  “We can’t both be losing our minds,” Jean said. She couldn’t sleep nights. She would gladly take his nightmares if she could just sleep.

  On the morning of the day she left, he woke to find her sitting at her dressing table, staring at herself. “Honey?” he said.

  “Go back to sleep,” she said. “I woke the boys. It’s early.”

  He watched her for a moment. She wasn’t doing anything. She simply stared. It was as if she saw something in the mirror. “Jean,” he said, and she looked at him exactly the same way she had been looking at the mirror. He said, “Why don’t we go to the performance tonight?”

  “I’m too tired by that time of day,” she said. Then she looked down and muttered, “I’m too tired right now.”

  The boys were playing in their room. In the next few minutes their play grew louder, and then they were fighting. Michael screamed; Rodney had hit him over the head with a toy fire engine. It was a metal toy, and Michael sat bleeding in the middle of the bedroom floor. Both boys were crying. Casey made Michael stand, and located the cut on his scalp. Jean had come with napkins and the hydrogen peroxide. She was very pale, all the color gone from her lips. “I’ll do it,” she said when Casey tried to help. “Get Rodney out of here.”

  He took Rodney by the hand and walked him into the living room. Rodney still held the toy fire engine, and was still crying. Casey bent down and took the toy, then moved to the sofa and sat down so that his son was facing him, standing between his knees. “Rodney,” he said, “listen to me, son.” The boy sniffled, and tears ran down his face. “Do you know you could have really hurt him—you could have really hurt your brother?”

  “Well, he wouldn’t leave me alone.”

  The fact that the child was unrepentent, even after having looked at his brother’s blood, made Casey a little sick to his stomach. “That makes no difference,” he said.

  Jean came through from the hallway, carrying a bloody napkin. “Is it bad?” he said to her as she went into the kitchen. When she came back, she had a roll of paper towels. “He threw up, for Christ’s sake. No, it’s not bad. It’s just a nick. But there’s a lot of blood.” She reached down and yanked Rodney away from his father. “Do you know what you did, young man? Do you? Do you?” She shook him. “Well, do you?”

  “Hey,” Casey said, “take it easy, honey.” “Agh,” she said, letting go of Rodney, “I can’t stand it anymore.”

  Casey followed her into the bedroom, where she sat at the dressing table and began furiously to brush her hair.

  “Jean,” he said, “I wish we could talk.”

  “Oh, Jesus, Casey.” She started to cry. “It’s not even eight o’clock and we’ve already had this. It’s too early for everything. I get to work and I’m exhausted. I don’t even think I can stand it.” She put the brush down and looked at herself, crying. “Look at me, would you? I look like death.” He put his hands on her shoulders, and then Rodney was in the doorway.

  “Mommy,” Rodney whined.

  Jean closed her eyes and shrieked, “Get out of here!”

  Casey took the boy into his room. Michael was sitting on his bed, holding a napkin to his head. There was a little pool of sickness on the floor at his feet. Casey got paper towels and cleaned it up. Michael looked at him with an expression of pain, of injured dignity. Rodney sat next to Michael and folded his small hands in his lap. Both boys were quiet, and it went through Casey’s mind that he could teach them something in this moment. But all he could think to say was “No more fighting.”

  Dana is the wife of the dentist Jean has worked for since before she met Casey. The two women became friends while Dana was the dentist’s receptionist. The dentist and his wife live in a large house on twenty acres not far from the city. There’s an indoor pool, and there are tennis courts; fireplaces in the bedrooms. There’s plenty of space for Jean, who moved in on a Friday afternoon, almost a month ago now. That day she just packed a suitcase; she was simply going to spend a weekend at Dana’s, to rest. It was just going to be a little relaxation, a little time away. Just the two days. But then Sunday afternoon she phoned to say she would be staying on through the week.

  “You’re kidding me,” Casey said.

  And she began to cry.

  “Jean,” he said, “for God’s sake.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, crying, “I just need some time.”

  “Time,” he said. “Jean. Jean.’”

  She breathed once, and when she spoke again there was resolution in her voice, a definiteness that made his heart hurt. “I’ll be over to pick up a few things tomorrow afternoon.”

  “Look,” he said, “what is this? What about us? What about the boys?”

  “I don’t think you should let them see me tomorrow. This is hard enough for them.”

  “What is, Jean.”

  She said nothing. He thought she might’ve hung up.

  “Jean,” he said. “Good Christ. Jean.”

  “Please don’t do this,” she said.

  Casey shouted into the phone. “You’re saying that to me!”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, and hung up.

  He dialed Dana’s number, and Dana answered.

  “I want to speak to Jean, please.”

  “I’m sorry, Casey—she doesn’t want to talk now.”

  “Would you—” he began.

  “I’ll ask her. I’m sorry, Casey.”

  “Ask her to please come to the phone.”

  There was a shuffling sound, and he knew Dana was holding her hand over the receiver. Then there was another shuffling, and Dana spoke to him. “I hate to be in the middle of this, Casey, but she doesn’t want to talk now.”

  “Will you please ask her what I did.”

  “I can’t do that. Really. Please, now.”

  “Just tell her I want—goddammit—I want to know what I did.”


  There was yet another shuffling sound, only this time Casey could hear Dana’s voice, sisterly and exasperated and pleading.

  “Dana,” he said.

  Silence.

  “Dana.”

  And Dana’s voice came back, very distraught, almost frightened. “Casey, I’ve never hung up on anyone in my life. I have a real fear of ever doing anything like that to anyone, but if you cuss at me again I will. I’ll hang up on you. Jean isn’t going to talk to anyone on the phone tonight. Really, she’s not, and I don’t see why I have to take the blame for it.”

  “Dana,” he said, “I’m sorry. Tell her I’ll be here tomorrow—with her children. Tell her that.”

  “I’ll tell her.”

  “Goodbye, Dana.” He put the receiver down. In the boys’ room it was quiet, and he wondered how much they had heard, and—if they had heard enough—how much they had understood.

  There was dinner to make, but he was practiced at it, so it offered no difficulty except that he prepared it in the knowledge that his wife was having some sort of nervous breakdown, and was unreachable in a way that made him angry as much as it frightened him. The boys didn’t eat the fish he fried, or the potatoes he baked. They had been sneaking cookies all day while he watched football. He couldn’t eat either, and so he didn’t scold them for their lack of appetite and only reprimanded them mildly for their pilferage.

  Shortly after the dinner dishes were done, Michael began to cry. He said he had seen something on TV that made him sad, but he had been watching The Dukes of Hazzard.

  “My little tenderhearted man,” Casey said, putting his arms around the boy.

  “Is Mommy at Dana’s?” Rodney asked. “Mommy had to go do something,” Casey said.

  He put them to bed. He wondered as he tucked them in if he should tell them now that their mother wouldn’t be there in the morning. It seemed too much to tell a child before sleep. He stood in their doorway, imagining the shadow he made with the light behind him in the hall, and told them good night. Then he went into the living room and sat staring at the shifting figures on the television screen. Apparently, The Dukes of Hazzard was over; he could tell by the music that this was a serious show. A man with a gun chased another man with another gun. It was hard to tell which one was the hero, and Casey began to concentrate. It turned out that both men were gangsters, and Jean, who used to say that she only put TV on sometimes for the voices, the company at night, had just told him that she was not coming home. He turned the gangsters off in mid-chase and stood for a moment, breathing fast. The boys were whispering and talking in the other room.